The Wonderful Wizard of Quark: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard P. Feynman; Norton; 350 pages; $16.95

Richard P. Feynman, 66, is a Nobel-prizewinning physicist who talks like a New York City cabby, plays the bongo drums and, to judge from his uninhibited autobiography, thinks as much of his ability to crack safes as he does of his genius for breaking cosmic codes. As part of the brain trust that made the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, Feynman amused himself during quiet desert nights by entering colleagues' offices and picking the locks meant to guard nature's most destructive secrets. Since 1951 he has opened thousands of young minds as a professor at the California Institute of Technology, where...

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